


It’s a Clear Reception, It’s a Long Connection

by DesireeArmfeldt



Category: due South
Genre: Angst, Hope, M/M, My First Work in This Fandom, POV First Person, Post-Call of the Wild, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-18
Updated: 2012-01-18
Packaged: 2017-10-29 18:26:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/322818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesireeArmfeldt/pseuds/DesireeArmfeldt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post CotW.  Fraser gets a phone call.  Unauthorized sequel to spuffyduds's "This is a Story that I Tell Myself."</p>
            </blockquote>





	It’s a Clear Reception, It’s a Long Connection

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [This is a Story That I Tell Myself](https://archiveofourown.org/works/50288) by [spuffyduds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spuffyduds/pseuds/spuffyduds). 



> Inspired by spuffyduds’s heartbreaking “This is a Story that I Tell Myself," which needs no sequel, but I wrote one anyway. 
> 
> Thanks to greenlily for beta-ing and moral support.
> 
> Title from David Wilcox’s song “Mighty Ocean.”

 

The RCMP outpost at Tuktoyaktuk is instantiated in a two-room building with heat, electricity, two desks, a computer, and a telephone line.  In the three months since taking up my new posting, I have spent as little time here as possible.  There is, thank goodness, a minimum of administrative work to be done in such a small, remote station, and my superiors understand that the nature of the posting requires us to be out of the station for days or even weeks at a time.

 

As it happens, it has been six days.  In that time, I succeeded in apprehending a fugitive from justice, who, by the time I found him, was grateful to be rescued from freezing to death.  Having made the necessary arrangements for his transfer to Inuvik, where the local RCMP will see to processing his case and sending him back to Toronto to stand trial, I have no further duties in connection with this case, except of course for the entirely reasonable modicum of tedious paperwork associated with it, which will consume some little portion of today.

 

I am the first to arrive at the station.  My—partner, I suppose I must call her, for lack of another term—arrives shortly thereafter.  Constable Katherine DuBois is, as far as I have been able to ascertain, a fine officer, intelligent, capable, courteous, and principled.  We have exchanged perhaps a few hundred sentences in the three months we have known each other.  Sometimes I am able to bring myself to worry that my taciturnity is unfair to Constable DuBois, who is, after all, stuck here without anyone apart from myself to speak to.  It would be polite, perhaps, to make the effort to engage her in regular conversation, to get to know her, to form a more cordial relationship than our present, entirely harmonious but nearly silent one.  But then again, no one takes a posting to Tuktoyaktuk in order to indulge his or her natural extroversion and desire for incessant chatter.

 

“Good morning,” she greets me as she shucks off her parka.

 

“Good morning, Constable,” I reply, glancing up from my paperwork long enough to make eye contact and give her a pleasant smile.

 

“There was a phone call for you while you were out,” she says.

 

For a moment, I am unable to force any words past my lips.  “I beg your pardon?” I manage at last.

 

“A phone call,” she repeats.  “When I told him you were out on patrol, he asked me if I could tell him a time when you were likely to be in the station, so he could call again.  I told him to try this afternoon.”

 

“Ah.  Yes.  All right.”  Do I need to ask the name?  Do I want to know?  Better not to be surprised, I suppose, and in any case it might be any number of. . .well, there are a few people it might possibly be, other than the obvious.  “What was his name?”

 

“Mr. Kowalski.”

 

Under my desk, Diefenbaker snuffles sharply.  Puts his chin on my knee.  My hand automatically goes to rest on his head, but I don’t look at him.

 

“All right,” I hear my voice say.  “Thank you kindly, Constable."

 

I complete the paperwork on my capture of the fugitive embezzler.  I complete a few other forms that have been waiting for my attention.  I reorganize the file structure of the station computer.  I do not think about anything.

 

When the phone finally rings, I jerk as though I’ve been shot.  I feel rather as if I’ve been shot as well: numb, and as if my body is very heavy and very far away.

 

Constable DuBois’s desk is closest to the phone.  She looks at me before standing up to answer it.  She says hello, says yes, just a moment.  Holds out the receiver in my direction.

 

Somehow, I am standing there with the phone in my hand.

 

“Hello?”  My voice sounds distant to my own ears, like I’m the one on the other end of a long-distance line.

 

“Hey, Fraser.”  Ray’s voice sounds like he’s standing in the room with me.  Like he’s speaking inside my head.  Only his voice is lighter, rougher, more nuanced than the version that has been speaking in my head for the past six months.  More real.

 

“I, uh, I said I’d call,” he says, after a moment in which I fail to say anything.  “So here I am.  Calling.  And you know, it was a bitch and a half figuring out where to find you, plus apparently you’re never actually here, why am I not surprised?  Spend all your time out in the snow catching poachers these days, huh?”

 

“Embezzler,” I whisper, when the silence has once again gone on too long.

 

“What?”

 

“Embezzler,” I repeat, forcing my voice louder.  “I spent the last week on the trail of a man who fled to the Northwest Territories—rather ill-advisedly, as it turned out—after embezzling thirty million dollars from an environmental clean-up agency based in Toronto.”

 

Ray chuckles, and my God, I didn’t know, haven’t let myself know, how much I’ve missed that sound.  The Ray in my head laughs frequently, of course, but it isn’t the same.

 

“Why am I not surprised?” he says again. 

 

Once again, there is silence on the line.  I am not doing my part to hold up this conversation, but my throat is frozen shut and I feel like it’s all I can do to keep myself upright, anchored to this telephone, to the wall, to Ray’s voice thousands of miles away.

 

“Well, uh, hey, you want me to tell you what everyone’s been up to since you’ve been gone?” Ray asks.  “The guys at the station and Frannie and everyone?”

 

“No!”  The word rips out of me before he’s finished asking the question.

 

“Okay, fine, don’t have to talk about them if you don’t want to.”  Ray is naturally startled, baffled at my vehement refusal to hear news of people who were, at least in some measure, my friends, certainly my colleagues.  And I should want to hear, it would be polite to ask, but I can’t.  In my imagination, I have created happy endings for them and sent them on their way.  It would be too cruel to call them back.

 

“Listen, Fraser. . .”  Ray hesitates.  “Why I called.  I—How are you doing up there?”

 

“I’m fine, Ray,” I manage, though saying his name causes something to start shivering inside me.

 

“No, seriously, Fraser,” he says.  “I’m not asking to be polite, I really want to know.  No bullshit.  ‘Cause you, when I—when I left, you were, like, you were not doing so hot, okay?  And I know you needed some time alone after all that shit with Muldoon and the media circus and all the rest of it, but I also, I thought, maybe I was wrong, but maybe you needed someone to watch your back, and I, I, I left you alone up there, and. . .” 

 

 _And that’s not buddies_ , I can hear him saying, in the angry voice that was part shock-tactics to get through to me, part a disguise for his pain.  Or in a smaller, softer voice, owning up to his own mistakes in a way I seldom have had the strength to do, not when the mistakes have been emotional ones.

 

But he doesn’t say that now.  We’re no longer buddies.  No longer anything.

 

 _It’s all right, Ray_ , I could tell him.  _I’m fine.  You don’t need to worry about me._   Despite the impression many people seem to have of me, which I allow them to form, I am quite capable of telling certain sorts of lies.

 

Except that right now, I don’t seem to be capable of speech; I am barely capable of breathing.  And I have let the silence go on too long again, and Ray is surely drawing the obvious, but incorrect conclusion.

 

“Okay, look, I’m sorry, you don’t want to be having this kind of a conversation, that’s fine, I get that, and maybe you don’t want to be talking to me at all.  Which, okay.  I’ll shut up and hang up, just. . .tell me you’re okay.  Okay?”

 

“Don’t,” I whisper.

 

“Fraser?”

 

“Don’t go.”

 

A whoosh of breath from his end of the phone.

 

“Okay, Frase,” he says quietly.  “I’ll stay right here.”

 

“Thank you.”  I am not certain I actually manage to voice the words.  I hold onto the telephone, listening to Ray’s breathing.  I find myself holding my own breath in order to hear his, and force myself to expel air, take in a new lungful. 

 

“You got something you want to say to me?” Ray asks.

 

“I—“  I find I am actually leaning on the wall for support.  “I’m afraid. . .I’m not very good with people.”

 

Ray makes a sharp noise that is not quite laughter.

 

“Yeah, you said that.  I remember.  Done a lot of wondering what exactly you meant by that.”

 

_I can’t take care of you.  I can’t be the one you look to for happiness.  I can’t be the one who hurts you, again, as you don’t deserve to be hurt.  I can’t share myself with you.  I can’t make you happy, keep you happy.  I don’t know how.  I’m afraid._

 

I say nothing.

 

“You still there, Frase?”  The gentleness of Ray’s tone, and the fact that he’s slipped back into calling me by this nickname, make my chest ache.  I am shaking, now, hanging onto the wooden wall.  I am dimly aware of Diefenbaker’s warm back against my knees: support, comfort, infinitely far away.

 

“I’m here,” I whisper.  My voice sounds like I’ve been days without water.

 

“You want to know what I think?”

 

“Please.”

 

“I think you’re great with people, as long as you’re in control of the situation, as long as it’s about you giving them what they need, what you can afford to give them, and not needing anything from them except maybe information or transportation or stuff like that.  And you’re so fucking good at being good to people, making their lives a little brighter while keeping yourself safe in a cardboard box somewhere, that mostly you get away with it.  Because people don’t notice what you’re doing.  Oh, they get that you’re off somewhere they can’t get at, but they figure that the problem is that they’re not good enough for you.  It never occurs to anyone to think maybe the real problem is that you’re afraid you might not be good enough for them.  ‘M I anywhere in the ballpark, here?”

 

 _I can’t_.  Diefenbaker barks once, sharply.  There’s a soft, amused snort from Ray, but he doesn’t say anything.  For a long time.

 

“Ray.”

 

“Yeah, Fraser?”

 

I can’t answer his question, not the one he asked and not the one that I think—hope? fear?—is behind it.  Not directly, not now.  He’s not wrong, but he’s not exactly right, either, and I still don’t know how to explain, even to myself, what it is that terrified me about Ray looking at me with all the love that his glorious heart is capable of.  But I have to say something.

 

“Ray, can I—can I tell you a story?”

 

There’s a slight pause, and I imagine annoyance flitting across his face— _another one of Fraser’s stupid caribou stories_ —to be replaced by something more patient— _Okay, I’ll bite, let’s see where this is going. . ._

 

“Sure, Frase,” he says.  “Lay it on me.”

 

I have told this story many times, to Diefenbaker, silently to myself as I try to let sleep take hold of me.  To the sun, rising on the first day when daylight begins to lengthen.  I take a deep breath, plant my feet under me, stand up straight (one hand still resting on the wall, the other pressing the receiver to my cheek), and begin.

 

“Detectives Jack Huey and Thomas Dewey realized their dream of the One-Liner and their comedy club played to marginal houses for a long time.”

 

Ray gives another soft snort—surprised? amused? irritated?—but doesn’t interrupt as I continue.

 

“Constable Turnbull decided to run for public office. . .”  My voice grows stronger as I continue, relating all of the happy endings I have invented for our Chicago colleagues.  I picture their smiles: Frannie surrounded by rambunctious children, my dear Ray Vecchio at peace with his bowling alley and his new wife.  I picture Ray Kowalski’s grin, lit by campfirelight, as he listens to me spinning these imagined futures.  And my voice doesn’t falter as I reach the end of my tale: “We set off, Ray and I, we set off on an adventure.  Off we went, to find the Hand of Franklin, reaching for the Beaufort Sea.”

 

There’s a long pause on the other end of the line.  Then Ray laughs softly.  I picture him shaking his head.  I picture his fist lashing out, punching a wall.

 

“Well, Fraser, that’s. . .”  He clears his throat.  “That’s a real nice story.  Do, uh, do we find it? In the end?”

 

That is the end of the story, as I’ve always told it to myself.  “I. . .When I find out, I’ll let you know, Ray.”

 

“Huh.” 

 

Another pause, but now my throat seems to have loosened, and the tremors have stopped rattling my body, and I feel as though it might not be impossible to form more words.

 

“Ray?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“I’m glad you called.”

 

“Told you I would.”  Is it my ears or simply my overheated imagination that tells me that Ray’s voice wobbles as he says it?

 

“I know,” I say.  It was more than I deserved, it is more than I deserve, but he did say so, they were very nearly the last words I heard from him, and Ray doesn’t break his promises.  Not the important ones.

 

“Listen, Fraser?”

 

I do listen, but Ray doesn’t continue his thought.

 

“Yes? Ray?”

 

“If I called again.  Same time next week.  You be here?”

 

“I’ll be here,” I promise.

 

Diefenbaker shoves his nose into my hand and snuffles encouragingly.  It occurs to me to wonder what Constable DuBois must be making of all of this.  But when I pry my eyes open, she is nowhere to be seen.  She must have decided that this was a situation that called for tact and privacy, and taken herself off somewhere on her snowshoes.  I must think of some equally tactful way to express my gratitude.  Later.

 

“And maybe you can tell me some more of that story, huh?” says Ray, and he’s not even pretending to be casual, this is his serious-business voice.

 

“Yes, Ray.  I think I can manage that.”


End file.
